My story “From the Barrel of a Gun” has been accepted into SUPER, an anthology of super hero fiction from Static Movement Press.

This story was adapted from a screenplay I wrote in film school about a city over run by brawling super heroes and villains and the group of determined snipers who fight back. One of my many strange mantras is that “A gun is the ultimate super power.” I had a lot of fun doing the research for this story, and I think it shows. I’ll share more when the book comes out.

RESULTS MAY VARY, my very first short story to be accepted for print publication, is now available at Amazon in the Static Movement Press anthology SCIENCE GONE MAD.

This story takes place in a very dark near future of bio-terrorism and paranoia. My early drafts revealed more about the world that was later omitted as unnecessary exposition. But seeing as how this is my secret crypt, you’ll find all sorts of interesting things on the cutting room floor.

Puns!

The evolution of terrorism in China (specifically the breakaway Uyghur Muslim separatists) has lead fanatical yet highly educated scientists to engineer Genocide Bombers. The first attack occurs at the Olympic games in Hyderabad, India. Four million die, the United States joins China in their struggle against terrorism, and we become the next targets.

It’s a tense situation: entire cities are quarantined, people live in fear of deadly plagues and the government is ready to firebomb any location they suspect is compromised. Our hero is bored and lonely in his sealed apartment, and looking for a distraction before he goes stir crazy. When he orders an experimental party drug from a darknet website his life gets stranger than he could ever imagine.

I often listen to music to set the mood while I write, and I listened to a lot of Philip Jeck for this one. These are deep, moody and often disturbing soundscapes. Ah, Dystopia!

My story LEVIATHAN is now online at Avenir Eclectia. This is the second story featuring Dr. Kwame Singh, and this time he’s taking the plunge into the alien planet’s ocean depths.

He takes his ride in a high tech bathysphere. The bathysphere was invented in the late 1920’s by Otis Barton and William Beebe to observe deep-sea animals in their natural habitat. These brave explorers would climb into the 1 inch thick steel sphere and the hatch would be bolted shut. For oxygen they breathed in cannned air, used trays of chemicals to absorb CO2, and circulated the air by hand with palm fans.

A crane lowered the craft on a cable half a mile down into the ocean. Their windows were giant plugs of fused quartz. General Electric provided a lamp to illuminate animals and Bell Laboratories provided a telephone system so that the sphere could communicate with the surface.

Down at such crushing depths there were many ways to die. One thing they didn’t worry about was drowning: due to the immense pressure any leak meant that “the first few drops of water would have shot through flesh and bone like steel bullets.”

Not only did they broadcast some of their dives over national radio, they also brought film cameras to record many fish new to science, and set many new depth records. Because they could not bring back the specimens they observed many of the alien and bizarre creatures could not be confirmed until many years later. Some of those beasts have still not been confirmed at all. Beebe wrote an article for National Geographic titled “A Half Mile Down: Strange Creatures Beautiful and Grotesque as Figments of Fancy, Reveal Themselves at Windows of Bathysphere”.

Soon the bathysphere was made obsolete by advances in submarine technology. The New York Zoological society loaned the craft to the U.S. Navy and later the World’s Fair. It ended up in an exhibit in the New York Aquarium, but was later moved to storage for almost a decade under the Coney Island Cyclone.

Imagine a group of curious boys crawling under the Coney Island boardwalk and finding the silent hulk half buried in the sand. The brass bolts, green with rust, are unyielding. They throw rocks at the strange thick windows and they bounce off, sending deep gongs across the steel shell and through their skin.

Something skitters to life inside the bathysphere but the sound is lost as the roller coaster rattles overhead. What grotesque creatures had been spotted out those windows so long ago, never to be seen again? Something uncoils beneath the sand. The Cyclone thunders by again, snatching up the screams of children into its chorus.